The 2015/16 El Niño Drought Impacts and Household Coping Strategies: Gender-based Perspective

The 2015/16 El Niño-driven drought is the most severe South Africa has experienced in decades, causing a significant nationwide impact. While drought affects all households, understanding how its impacts manifest across gender is critical, as heterogeneity in household composition could shape the magnitude and distribution of welfare losses. This study examines the effect of the 2015/16 severe drought in South Africa over time and across gender on various household outcomes and how households coped with the drought. To begin, I merged household panel data with gridded drought data from 2010 to 2017 and used the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to explore food security and adaptation expenditure gaps across male-headed and female-headed households (MHHs and FHHs). The results shows that MHHs spend 24\% more on food per capita than FHHs, and that the drought has no impact on food or adaptation expenditure gaps. Next, I examined the contemporaneous and persistent effects of the drought on households and found that average households and MHHs experienced 11.9 and 15.1 percentage point reductions in food security in 2015/16, respectively, compared to FHHs. However, as the drought persisted into 2017, FHHs experienced a greater reduction in food security of 11.8 percentage points. Adaptation expenditure showed a similarly negative impact over time and across gender, but the coefficients were insignificant. MHHs and FHHs coped differently with the drought, with MHHs relying on government transfers while FHHs and overall households relied on wealth. Beyond food security, the drought had adverse impacts on health outcomes, as younger children in MHHs experienced greater effects.